Federal Reports

To combat money laundering in the U.S., Congress enacted a series of laws, collectively referred to as the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA). The BSA required financial institutions, including money services businesses, to report suspicious activities to the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). Under the BSA, the Postal Service is defined as a money services business and is required to report suspicious activity involving money order sales transactions or patterns of transactions. The Postal Service must also provide BSA Anti-Money Laundering training to all employees responsible for or overseeing the sale of financial instruments such as money orders. Our objectives were to determine whether the Postal Service properly reviews and reports suspicious activity information, and to evaluate contractor compliance and Postal Service oversight of its BSA training contract.

The OIG investigated allegations that a tribal wildland fire employee submitted false overtime claims in 2018.We found insufficient evidence to prove or disprove the allegation. The wildland fire employee denied the allegations and said any overtime claimed was fire related, and we did not find any evidence to refute this statement. The wildland fire employee’s supervisor signed and approved all the employee’s timesheets.

Public law requires the heads of Federal agencies to annually review programs that they administer to identify and develop actions to reduce improper payments.The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) administers the Comprehensive Error Rate Testing (CERT) program to measure improper Medicare fee-for-service payments to providers.Previous OIG reports recommended using CERT data to identify and focus on providers that were prone to having errors.Our objective was to determine whether CMS and its contractors used CERT program data to identify and focus on error-prone providers.